Account Maxed

I apologize for the intermittent delays and outages on the Community Color sites. It appears that I've maxed out the resources on my account with Westhost.com. I am using the Westhost cloud service with costs $50 a month. I could double the capacity of the account by going to the next service level, but this would cost another $50/month.

But the sites don't generate $50/month in revenue!

I cannot a $50 a month upgrade!

So, what I am going to do is to switch to an SSD Cloud account on VPS.net.

The Westhost account is a managed account. I includes the CPanel management tool.

I will have to do all the management for the VPS.net account. I will have to use an SSH Shell instead of CPanel ... but I will save $20/month.

As I don't want to spend a lot of time configuring Linux. I decided to go with a basic install of the Ubuntu framework. Ubuntu goes through a little bit more testing that Debian or Centos.
I want to use the Xenial Xerus release of Ubuntu which is scheduled for release on April 21, 2016. I don't know how long it will take VPS.net to offer this on their service.

I am excited about this release.

Xenial Xerus uses PHP7 which includes some major performance improvements. I also intend to switch from using MySQL to SQLite which should also result in performance improvements.

The final problem I face is with the structure of my code.

I wrote two different versions of the site. The first version follows best practices and uses the object-oriented syntax of PHP. The second version uses structured functions.

Despite the fact that object-oriented syntax is considered to be the best form of programming. Traditional structured programming seriously outperform the object-oriented style.

The universities, Fortune 500 firms and governments that prefer class-based object oriented programming can overcome the inherent inefficiencies of this programming style by throwing more hardware at the problem.

But, even $5.00 a month is a huge difference for a small company or individual. (My performance tests all tell me that using the class-based object code in PHP will cost me $5.00 a month.)

Since I am struggling to survive, my temptation is to simply scrap all of my class-based code and just stick with functions.

This leads to my final problem: I have the naive notion that I should open source all of my code. I would be publishing a bunch of functions to people who've been taught that class-based objects are superior to functions.

So, I've been spinning my wheels trying to develop a collection of objects that do not take up more resources than traditional procedural programming. And simple can't nail down a design.

Anyway, I want to apologize for the down time people are experiencing on the Community Color sites. It would cost me $50 a month to fix the problem on my current server. So I am stuck waiting for a software release hoping to lower my costs so that I can keep the sites live.

I anticipate that I will be able to move the sites within a few days after Xenial Xerus becomes available on VPS.net. Until then, I am only able to apologize for down time. I anticipate the release being available some time in early May.